A Tale of Two Americas: Is there a Different Kind Of Civil War Coming?

I have been conned. And so have you. As Americans, we’ve all been conned. It’s like an Oprah episode, only instead of getting a copy of a book you’re never going to read or a car or some shit, you just get ripped off forever.

What am I talking about? If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know where this is going. A lot of the problems of our country, many which seem totally unrelated, all boil down to the fact that capitalism implies winners and losers, and the winners have Jedi mind tricked y’all into thinking you can catch up with their centuries of money if you deserve it and/or work hard enough.

You probably can’t, and that’s not just my opinion as a slutty black magic practicing communist and enemy of the moral order or whatever.

“Having cities full of empty rotting houses while homeless people die in the streets, because having anyone under a certain tax bracket living in them would make the money sad, is insane.”

Let me run a scenario by you.

Two babies are born. Both white. Both male. Both have little tufts of tawny hair and big blue eyes. They are plump, healthy, and fairly chill babies. They have those cute little baby toes. You know the ones I’m talking about. That’s the good shit.

One is born in an affluent suburb near New York City to some old money motherfuckers. One is born to a poor family in rural Pennsylvania that burns their own trash, because no municipal trash services are available. The only WalMart is two towns over. There is no grocery store.

Old Money Baby’s dad is an alcoholic and a fuck up by all accounts, but he’s also an heir, so it doesn’t matter that he is unable to provide for his family or himself, or do any of the things that anyone of a lower class would hate themselves for being unable to do. Despite earning nothing for himself, he has several houses, a number of cars, and dresses impeccably.

Because he’s drinking scotch and IPAs instead of PBR, it’s classy. Because he’s rich, his cruel neglect of his son in favor of being constantly fucked up is fine. He’s just distant and showing him tough love. He’s not mentally ill. He’s not an addict. He doesn’t have to address anything. He doesn’t have anger problems. He’s fine.

Old Money Baby goes to a good school, but grows up traumatized and deeply angry because his father is an emotionally distant drunk that spent half of his childhood shooting lions in Africa and the other half screaming at him. His mother has been at brunch with some other housewives for ten years straight.

He gets into drugs in high school, and gets caught, but it doesn’t matter because his dad is friends with the judge. He goes to Columbia for no real reason, other than that he can and most of his family has, and spends most of his time there drunk, and despite never really putting effort into his education, he’s been passed through so many high quality educational institutions that some of it sticks.

Old Money Baby graduates college too fucked up and miserable and drunk to hold down any job, but it doesn’t really matter. His family money carries him through. At the age of 40 he hasn’t held a job down for more than a few months ever, but lives comfortably. It’s fine. He’s not mentally ill either. He’s also not an alcoholic. The cycle is not continuing. It’s all fine.

Ok, so let’s talk about what happens to Baby Pennsyltucky, after growing up with a deadbeat alcoholic father, and a mother who doesn’t have time for him.

Baby Pennsyltucky goes to an unfunded rural school where there isn’t a textbook that isn’t from before 1975. He lives in a crumbling house with parents who work three jobs between them, but can afford nothing. There is no computer in his house. There’s only electricity about half the time.

His parents can’t afford a lot of the most basic shit, like even laundry detergent. Many poor families have only two kinds of soap in their house; bar soap for washing your ass, and the cheapest industrial tub of dish soap, which is used for literally everything else. Baby Pennsyltucky’s clothing is washed with dish soap. His parents can’t afford to buy him deodorant. He smells like shit all throughout school, and because of that the other kids fucking torture him.

He’s tortured by other kids at school, and at home by his family members, because it turns out no one really reacts well to the constant pressure of existing on the edge of complete desolation.

His dad is either at work or home drunk and unconscious. He sees his mother every few days, and it’s clear that she regrets having him, because how could she not? None of them really know each other.

It’s no fucking secret that there is an opioid crisis in this country, and whether you believe it’s a terrible accident or yet another attempt by the lizard people to cull the herd, we all know it’s happening. There’s whole streets you walk down in my city and can find needles sprinkled everywhere, like the world’s most fucked up confetti. It’s so fucked up that librarians are learning how to handle overdoses.

Baby Pennsyltucky learns no skills and absorbs nothing from his underfunded school where he is isolated and tortured, because the school isn’t really there to teach anyone anything; just to tick off some boxes so the powers that be can pretend they tried.

Baby Pennsyltucky ends up overdosing on heroin at age 16. He almost dies. There’s no money and no safety net. There’s no one to smooth things over. His parents kick him out and he hops between friends couches for awhile until their generosity dries up. Somewhere in there he drops out of high school, but it doesn’t really matter to him. When he gets mixed up in drugs there’s no one to back him up,and there’s no one to bail him out; there’s no nothing. He goes to jail, where he is further traumatized, but this is never addressed.

No one cares. He’s another degenerate, alcoholic, addict, scumbag that just can’t do anything right and doesn’t deserve anything, right?

Like many prisoners, he goes in and out of jail for years. He’s more or less homeless in between, because employers won’t hire ex-convicts to do upstanding over the table work in many cases, regardless of what their charges actually are. And when he does get hired he’s too deeply scarred and angry and mentally unstable to hold a job for long. But because there’s no old money backing up Baby Pennsyltucky, that makes him an irredeemable piece of shit in the eyes of our society. He’s someone who doesn’t deserve the very basics of a minimally non-miserable existence.

Baby Pennsyltucky and Old Money Baby are both white male American citizens born in the same country. They actually don’t even live far from each other. Let’s say that Baby Pennsyltucky lives in the Shippensburg, Pennsylvania area, which has a median income of about $31K, and Old Money Baby lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, which has a median income of over $150K.

Both of these assholes only live about 200 miles from each other. According to Google Maps, you could drive from one of their hometowns to the other in about 3.5 hours. This is less time than it takes somebody to watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

In the time it takes you to watch Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn go from a dirt and sweat caked sex god who looks like he would somehow smell worse before fucking you raw than after (!!!!!!!!), to some old guy in a dumb crown who probably bathes and would fuck you ok (…..), you could experience the vast chasm that exists between rich and poor America. In an afternoon basically.

Of course, there are vast intersections which influence just how far you can get in America, but right now I’m hitting it straight from the economic angle. While occasionally somebody Mad Max Fury Roads the shit out of a barrier, that does not negate an entire network of oppressive systems torturing millions of people.

When we have such vast disparities on multiple levels, including this one, why are we all pretending that everyone has the same opportunities for success? For most Americans, you only matter and deserve anything if you can prove it by having a lot of money. We believe this deeply about ourselves and others. So deeply that we are probably about to kill millions of our own citizens and not bat an eye.

It is for this reason that the Republicans might just manage to jack health care from over 20 million people. As Americans, a cornerstone of our culture is that you are only worth as much as you have. Your humanity is tied entirely into how much you are worth to your boss and how much you earn. Money lends you grace and buys your humanity, even if you didn’t do fuckshit to earn it. We don’t believe that life is innately important, even though we want to think we do. This disregard underpins what it means to be an American. To insinuate that people might need one another and have moments of “weakness” is offensive.

Do not buy into the fallacy that you are self made if you have anything, even if it’s not a lot. Don’t let them play you. Rich people who have done nothing to inherit their money, or maybe even did rad and respectable shit, but want to pretend they didn’t have a lot of help, have invented this self made bullshit. People who come from money will do wild leaps in logic to pretend they are self made. This can be seen everywhere from Ivanka Trump’s latest book to that song by Drake.

We are all products of our environments; both good and bad. We are our parents, we are our class, we are our race, our sex, our gender, our connections, our family. A lot of this has nothing to do with us. While we all have agency, it’s a lot easier to exercise that agency when you aren’t a starving child, and the President your parents voted for out of blind desperation and anger wants to take the one guaranteed meal you get a day from you.

We need to take the value off work and off money in this terrible system and put it back on people. Having cities full of empty rotting houses while homeless people die in the streets, because having anyone under a certain tax bracket living in them would make the money sad, is insane. Having two towns a few hours apart in the same country, be oceans apart economically, is crazy, and also probably a big part of the reason Trump won and the final season of America is so wild.

In Detroit, where capitalism has already notoriously failed, citizens are devising their own kind of economy, which responds to the needs of the people rather than prioritizing numbers and idolizing the fiction of hard work in exchange for things.

Why the fuck do our lives revolve around money and jobs, instead of ourselves?

Why aren’t we taking care of each other?

What are we doing?

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

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The dominant rich and powerful have come up with many excuses to justify their continued positions, such as Social Darwinism. Even religion has been used such as Calvinism which said you could tell if someone was approved by God by their success in this life. Now it’s personal responsibility and the sacred nature of private property. It doesn’t matter how you got that property, and taxation is theft. Evidently crushing the lives of millions here and flat out bombing them to dust on the rest of the planet isn’t a problem like theft because people aren’t property and therefore not sacred.

We’re not “taking care of each other” because it is not in human nature, if it were, good behavior would not have to be taught. Babies are a great example, they’re as narcissistic as you can get, feed me, play with me, change me, all right now or I’ll make your life miserable by crying nonstop until you do.

Until you understand that humans are not inherently good, you will continue to rely on them.

As for your two examples, at least both of those people get to eat every day, in socialist countries people never know when they will get their next meal.